A smart web marketing strategy can open
a current of qualified prospects for financial
advisors or financial planners. Or it can sap your time
and money.
So what do you need to know about web marketing to pump
prospects into your financial advisory practice?
Most smaller businesses, a recent survey revealed, count
on their websites to “provide credibility.”
That’s OK as far as it goes. But if that’s
all your website strategy does for your financial advisory
business, you’re missing out on its much greater
potential.
Here is a larger vision for your website and how to get
there. Let’s start at the beginning with web facts:
Your Competition
Your competition is the more than 101,435,253 websites
(as of November, 2006, according to a Netcraft survey) in
existence.
True, they’re not all financial advisors shouldering
each other for attention in your local area, but they do
compete for your prospects’ attention.
Your Opportunity
Your opportunity is the approximately 91 million searches
done on Google per day as of March, 2006. That doesn’t
count the searches on Yahoo, msn.com, and the other search
engines.
And your opportunity is the blossoming of local search.
According to recent research, 70 percent of adults
in the US use the Internet as an information source when
shopping locally for products and services.
We’ve set the stage. Now we’re ready to expand
the advantages of your web marketing strategy beyond demonstrating
your “credibility.” And it starts with enticing
qualified prospects to your website (gaining traffic). Then,
it’s your task to convince them to give you your desired
response.
Sage Advice From Walt Disney
“You don’t build it for yourself.
You know what the
people want and you build it for them.”
A Web Marketing Strategy
For Financial Advisors To Attract The Right People
Web Marketing Step 1 – Select your best,
most lucrative keyword phrases BEFORE building your site.
Single words probably won’t do much for your
financial advisory practice (retirement is an example).
Go for profitable phrases – 2, 3 or more
words strung together that people are actually using to
find financial advisers like you.
How do you know what these are?
- Do research at http://inventory.overture.com
- Or get suggestions from http://www.wordtracker.com
(about $8 for a one-day use, which is all you’ll
need)
Web Marketing Step 2 – Build your site as
a search-engine magnet to take advantage of free search
engine traffic.
That’s what search engine optimization is all about…putting
your keyword phrases to work for your financial services
practice in all the right places such as your
URL.
Another prime place for your keyword is in your page
title. Yes, every page needs a keyword-rich title.
Want another? In your headline. Yes,
again. Every page needs a headline.
The best free resource we know for do-it-yourself search
engine optimizers is Jill Whalen’s site at http://www.highrankings.com
Web Marketing Step 3 – Call on Google Adwords
to whisk traffic to your website. Yes, even for
Local businesses like your financial advisory practice.
Use your research in Step 1 to gather the right keyword
phrases.
Google provides decent directions about how to set up your
campaign. We’re not going into the nitty-gritty, technical
details here. To help you maximize these pay-per-click ads,
though, we’ll arm you with these Google A-B-C-D-E’s.
A - Add as many keywords and keyword phrases
as make sense for your practice.
Some 150, or more, variations aren’t out of line.
That way you won’t miss the top few that will be
most profitable for you.
B - Build your campaign around tightly clustered
groups of keywords.
For a brochures campaign we did we organized our campaign
around groups like write a brochure, business brochure,
create brochure, marketing brochures, etc.
Each had a slightly different slant and a headline that
keyed in on the key phrase.
C – Call on every bit of persuasive power
you can muster for your ad.
When you’ve finally settled on one ad, go right
back and write another. That way you can test one against
another and go for higher and higher results.
D - Deploy tight controls over your budget until
you see how everything plays out.
E – Eliminate the duds (and unnecessary
expense) by tracking everything you do on Google
so that you know what’s working
Web Marketing Step 4 – Know Your Numbers
Simply, track the vital elements of your site so that you
know where you are improving, or falling off.
Start here:
1 – It’s not “hits” that
are essential to know, but the unique visitors
arriving on your website.
A “hit” is the retrieval of any item like
a page or a graphic from a web server. A simple web page,
as an example, could have 4 graphics plus the page itself
for 5 hits.
2 – Get stats about how long people are
staying on your website.
This number is valuable. Otherwise, how do you know that
people are reading your site content? Consider this: The
longer people stay on your site the more likely they are
to give you the response you’re after.
Look into the median length of time people remain
on your site. This is more reliable than the average time,
because the average can be skewed by someone who enters
your site and keeps it open for hours.
This is just tracking kindergarten. Remember, tracking
starts you on the fast track to web marketing success!
Web usability guru Jacob Nielsen riffs on Walt Disney’s
about “knowing what people want and building it for
them.”
Sage Advice from Jacob Nielsen
“The web is no longer a marvel of
innovation, it’s an everyday tool,
and you differentiate yourself by providing both better
content
and better solutions to users’ problems.”
And that’s a smart web marketing strategy
both for attracting the right people and for prompting
them to give you the right response.
For more information about a web
marketing strategy please contact Shirley Hanson.
